How does LinkEyes find link partners?

We can’t tell you exactly how LinkEyes does it, for various reasons. It would also be impossible to tell you in a few words. Very simply, it takes your raw search and makes it a bit more complex so it will look for potential sources of links rather than any site matching your original raw search criteria. It uses a search engine called Exalead{http://www.exalead.com} to perform the search. Actually, you will observe that LinkEyes does not do just do one search based on your original criteria, but multiple searches, which you can step through to see multiple prospective link partners.

Why can’t I just use a directory of directories and submit my site to many of those directories rather than use LinkEyes?

There are several reasons why using LinkEyes is better than just submitting to directories. First, LinkEyes does not limit itself to finding directories as the source for backlinks. It will help you find any relevant site where there is an invitation to add a resource or your site’s details. Second, you can be as specific as you like with your search, so you can even find links from sites on very niche themes, if you like. Third, LinkEyes has many features to help you manage your link campaign beyond the act of finding links. This includes saving prospective link partners, contacting prospects, monitoring the status of your link requests and several other features.

Apart from helping me find link partners, is there anything else that LinkEyes can do for me?

Yes, LinkEyes PRO helps you with the following:

• Evaluate sites. Data such as the PR of the page found (and the PR of the home page owning the page found), the Alexa Traffic Rank, the number of backlinks (and the number of links from DMOZ and Wikipedia) are all shown in one place per site to help you determine the potential of each site as a source for links.
• Organise your prospects. You can save prospective link partners into projects and categories. Typically you would create a project for each website you are researching links for and one category per theme.
• Prepare and send link requests (including sending email requests and also completing HTML forms).
• Keep track of the status links including testing that links are in place.
• Export projects to .csv (comma separated value) files.

LinkEyes LITE users will need to upgrade (create an account{9.1}) to benefit from the above features.

Does LinkEyes help me find reciprocal link partners and won’t reciprocal linking be bad for my site?

LinkEyes helps you find one way links as well as two-way links. You can choose whether you want to just concentrate on one-way links (which, in general, are much more beneficial for your rankings) or you can concentrate on both. Regarding two-way links, as long as the resultant links add value from the point of view of human visitors to your site (and the link partner’s site) then there is absolutely nothing wrong (and they will also help your rankings). If you engage in reciprocal linking purely for the sake of increasing the number of links to your site, then reciprocal linking becomes a waste of effort (and, in some cases, can actually damage rankings).

I heard that natural linking is best and that using tools is bad practice. Is this true?

Natural linking is best, if your site is of such high quality that everybody who has an interest in your subject matter is talking about it and you get people linking to you without you needing to get out of bed in the morning. But in the vast majority of cases, you will need to actively tell people about your site and ask them to link. It’s the same as when a new product is launched. It won’t succeed without any active promotion. Products rarely sell themselves. One of LinkEyes benefits is that it helps you research sites to promote your site to.

Can I rely on LinkEyes for all my link building tasks?

LinkEyes will help you find many good links and (if you are using the PRO version) also evaluate them, save the ones you have found so you can prioritise them, check on their status and send link requests. You certainly could use LinkEyes for all your link building, but you may also want to do the following in addition:

• Optimise the link-ability of your site (in other words, make sure your site is a high quality, informative and useful resource that other webmasters will want to link to).
• Make it easy for others to link to you, preferably such that they will link to your site in a variety of ways (using a variety of keywords in their anchor text, plus not necessarily to your home page). Our LinkAttract tool (coming soon) will be indispensable in these matters.
• Check your competitors to see who is linking to them. Can you get some of these sites to link to your site?
• Be patient, as the effects on your search engine rankings can take several months.

Link experts such as those mentioned on our resources page will be able to provide you with more tips on link building.

Won’t using LinkEyes result in my site getting links from bad neighbourhoods such as link farms and spam sites?

LinkEyes does not result in links being added to your site automatically. Nor does it send off automated link requests. At the end of the day it’s up to you which sites you approach when requesting links. We have some tips on how to recognise link farms on our link building advice page.